Vern

There is a feeling I get when I travel alone. The moment I get to my destination—a hotel or Airbnb—when I walk in the room, roll my suitcase into a corner, and close the door, it hits me. I am hopeful on every trip that I won’t feel it this time, but I always do. My chest and stomach get tight. I can’t catch a full breath. There is a sense of dread and impending doom. An emptiness so loud one might think it is the thing I’ve come to visit. As if it lives right there in that room and has been waiting for me since the last time we saw each other. 

My house feels like this all the time now, without him here. 

I don’t want to say that I’m keeping score, but I am kind of keeping score. I am aware of who has reached out and who hasn’t. Who understands what this loss is and who doesn’t. Who thinks my grief is real and who doesn’t. I shouldn’t do this because it only makes me feel more alone sometimes. I am surprised too, in both directions. By the people who have stepped up when I wasn’t expecting them to and by the people who haven’t said a word. I don’t want to say that I know who my friends are now because I know that everyone has their own stuff. That not everyone is comfortable around death, or that it brings up their own grief, or that they just don’t know what to say. So it’s not keeping score as much as it’s taking note, or maybe it’s inventory. What supplies do I have on hand for the next time I go through something? Where do I need to build reinforcements? Where do I need to fill in gaps? 

In the first week I was barely functional. I scheduled three therapy appointments with three different therapists. They all told me that in their experience, losing a pet is often harder than losing a human—sometimes even harder than losing one’s mother or father. They tell me this is because the relationship is uncomplicated, unlike human-to-human relationships. They tell me that our relationships with animals are sometimes deeper than with humans. We build routines around them. Often, we sleep in the same bed with them. We spend so much time with them. Or at least I spent so much time with him—working from home meant we were together almost 24/7. For fifteen years, my day started and ended with him. We talked to each other, checked on each other. He came meowing into my office to tell me when he was hungry and howled at the top of the stairs when it was time for us to go to bed. I used to wake up at 4:30 in the morning because he was pacing on top of me and demanding food. Now, I sleep until my alarm goes off and then I just lay there, trying to figure out what to do.

I wonder if this would be easier if I didn’t live alone. If the house wasn’t as quiet as it is. I tell a good friend I get now why people get married and have kids. Why? she says with a chuckle. Because we aren’t supposed to be alone like this. 

In the week before the vet appointment, when I am going back and forth about whether it’s time or not, I read the same two pages in Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy over and over. I dog-eared and underlined both pages when I first read them several years ago. I thought then that this was the best thing I had ever read on grief, that I needed to remember reading this, that surely I was going to need to read it again someday. I inhale it as if I can somehow steel myself for what is going to come. As if I can put my own reinforcements in place and soften the blow.

Gay writes that grief is a threat to a culture “that has canonized the story of the rugged individual, the self-made, the need-nothing bootstrapping solitary conqueror-dude…” That what grievers bring back to us is that “if we become likewise infected, or subsumed—which can happen at any moment, indeed it ought to, right now, right now, right now, terrifying thought it is—everything will change, and for good.” 

Which is what I think people are afraid of when they don’t reach out to me, or when they shy away from me when I tell them how I really am—I am infected, and it’s contagious, and so I must be quarantined. I must be kept over here, away from the others who are just going about their days. 

Which I am fine with. I am unable to pretend as if everything is normal right now anyway. So it’s better if you stay away. 

I am at times ashamed for not realizing sooner that though he was a small cat, he had a huge presence. I did not realize how much of my life and my thoughts were tied to him. How every time I left the house I made sure he had enough food for the amount of time I would be gone. How I planned how long I would be gone based on how long he could comfortably be alone. How he was considered in my vacation plans, my weekend plans, my evening plans. How when I came home from anywhere the first thing I did, sometimes even before peeing when I really had to pee, was go into the bedroom to say hello and see if he was okay. I miscalculated the importance of having a living being to touch, one who touched back—whether curled up and pressed behind my knees, or swatting my hand away with his little paw. For all the times I cursed how much money I spent on his special diet, the way little pebbles of litter found their way all over the house, the cat hair covering his spot on the duvet, the cost of a cat sitter when I traveled, the anxiety of leaving him with said cat sitter when I traveled, the fact that I couldn’t spontaneously travel, or travel for long periods of time, his early wake-up call every single morning, even if we’d gone to bed late, I would do anything to bring him back. 

Even though childless cat ladies seem to be having a moment, I still feel like I’m not allowed to feel as bad as I do. I can hear people saying it’s just a cat, or it’s not like a person died. I keep minimizing the loss preemptively, saying, I know it’s not a person, but…

This is reinforced by the silence around me. By the colleagues who know what has happened but say nothing. By the family members who know but also say nothing. By the expectation that I will still meet deadlines and show up when needed and the unspoken understanding that whether I can think about anything other than him isn’t really anyone else’s problem. 

I resist the urge to tell everyone I see—the barista at the coffeeshop, the cashier at the grocery store. When they ask me how I am or how my day is going I want to say I am not good. I am not doing well at all. My cat died and I know I’m not supposed to be this upset but I am very upset and I can’t see any joy in my future. 

Another friend tells me that the need to tell it over and over is my need to have a witness. That we all need a witness. And my cat was my witness. 

It makes sense to me when he says this. I never really felt alone, living alone all these years. But I realize now that I wasn’t alone. Something saw me. Heard me. Smelled me. Something spoke to me and listened to me. He was the thing that was there when I went through a terrible break-up and had to figure out how to live alone again. He was there for two job changes, four house moves, three deaths of loved ones, one surgery, getting sober, and every minute I spent actively healing from past harms. 

Ross Gay again: “The griever knows, or comes to know, again and again, that it’s not only my beloved friend grandchild dog lover tree sibling auntie teacher parent relationship belief home glacier species that is changed, or gone, because when that one thing changed, everything changed.”

I have a hard time with this. I keep thinking about how a month ago I was perfectly content with my life. I was happy even. And now nothing feels okay. The proximity of that contentedness is so painful. I can still see it. I can almost touch it. As if I just need to take a few steps, maybe walk over a bridge and then I can be back there again. But the bridge has been demolished. I can’t go back there ever again. Which is a finality I can’t get my brain to understand. 

Sobriety plays into this too. This is maybe the first big thing I’ve had to go through without the aid of alcohol or any other kind of substance. Without anything to numb with. A friend suggests I take a weed gummy at the end of the day, just to give my brain a break. I want to. I really really do. I want nothing more than to forget this new reality for even five minutes. But I know that once I am shown a way out, I will choose it over everything else. Every time. 

My mother sends me some religious blog that I read out of obligation. In it is a quote from C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Lewis says of his wife’s death that “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” 

I almost resist the urge to tell you that I know my cat is not a wife. But I can’t. I know my cat is not a wife. But how can I convey to you that his absence, like a wife’s absence, is spread over everything?

In the mornings I look at the calendar on the fridge. It’s next to the coffee pot and where I used to write down whether he had vomited that morning, or whether he was eating. The vet told me a year ago to keep track of his good days and bad days, that when the bad ones outweigh the good ones, I’ll know. I kept waiting to know because everyone said it—you’ll know when it’s time. I kept counting the days on the calendar, looking for an obvious answer, but never got one. 

Now, as the days of the month tick down I begin to feel dread at turning the page to a new month, because it means leaving behind a month in which he was here.  

I miss saying his nicknames: Little Luv Bug, Sweet Pea, My Love, My Angel, Booger, Little Vern. Love. Munchkin.

My advice: Don’t ask people if they’ve considered getting another cat. Or dog. Or whatever. We don’t ask people if they are going to get another mother, or another spouse, or another sibling or another friend. (Again, I know I know, a person is not a pet.) The asking minimizes the loss. As if that being is something that can be replaced. It’s not about having a cat. It was very specifically about having that cat. 

The bereavement policy at work only covers immediate family—parents, siblings, or children. I cannot convey to you how much this infuriates me. How much our incessant talk of DEI, our seminars and workshops and trainings leave out certain demographics of people. We talk about inclusivity and equity for marginalized groups but we do not consider that single people—and all people really—might need time to grieve close friends, friends who were like family, aunts, cousins, neighbors, nieces and nephews, pets. It’s laid out right there in the employee handbook—here are the categories in which we will recognize your grief. For all others, you are on your own. 

I spent almost every weekend day this past summer sitting on my patio, under a big tree, reading. I keep thinking, why did I do that? Why didn’t I spend the days with him, inside? Why did I just leave him alone like that?

Now, the temps have dropped. I’ve pulled out blankets and the down comforter, all of which he loved. His favorite was a big, fluffy, purple blanket. He loved to knead the dough on it, snuggle in it, hide in it. 

I have not yet been able to take it out of the linen closet.

I keep the linen closet door slightly ajar, too. He had his own blanket on a shelf in there. That was his safe space. That’s where he slept during the winter days. I still open the blinds from the bottom up instead of the top down, to maximize the space for him to lay in the sun. I am still unable to sit in my meditation spot, because he always sat next to me, in his bed. I still wear earbuds on all of my work calls and when listening to podcasts, because the sound of voices coming from devices always upset him. Yesterday, after I put away the toilet paper I bought at Costco, I didn’t want to throw away the bag it came in because I used to leave it out for him to play in. There is still a nightlight in the laundry room for him, in case he needs to use the litter box at night. Last night, as I was falling into sleep, I swear I heard him yowling the way he did when he really wanted my attention. I startled awake, but there was only silence.

I do not feel like I am allowed to write about this. This topic, in the literary world, would be considered trite. No one wants to publish an essay about the pet you lost. I see it in submission guidelines from time to time. What we don’t want to see: stories about your dead pet, stories about your abortion, stories about dead grandparents. I never understand these guidelines. If we are trying to explore and understand the human condition—I thought, a key feature of the literary life—then why do we exclude such major cataclysms? Because they happen to everyone? Because they are not new? I would argue it’s because they happen to everyone, because they are not new, that we should explore them further. It’s all I want to read and talk about right now: Who or what did you lose, and how did you get through it? 

Because another thing I feel is that I was so unprepared for this. I was so knocked off center by this. And I feel like by now, in my mid-forties, I should have been better prepared for events of this kind. I should have a ritual or some kind of process in place for coping. When people die, there is a set time and place to gather and acknowledge the loss. But we mourn pets in silence. 

The other thing about people dying is that people show up for the mourners. They drop off casseroles and pick up groceries and help you plan a funeral. Everything stops for a while. No one expects you to keep up with the laundry, to run errands, to keep your house clean and go to work. But I have kept my entire life running, I have not dropped a single spinning plate. Because if I let even one go, I am the one who will have to clean up the mess later anyway.

Ross Gay says that what the griever is metabolizing is not obedient to a clock or a calendar. That doesn’t seem to matter to the world outside my door. I am only just now, six weeks later, beginning to wrap my head around what has happened, but everyone seems to be expecting me to be over it. I can tell because aside from one person, no one brings it up. No one asks how I’m doing. Or when they do ask, I know they are expecting me to say the usual “fine.” 

The therapists, and books, and articles, and podcasts tell me over and over how important it is for me to feel my grief. That I must allow myself to cry and be sad. That that’s the only way through. But I want to know how to do this in a world that is constantly trying to get me not to?

I learn randomly that journalist Anderson Cooper has a podcast about grief. That he is for the first time, in his mid-fifties, finally learning how to grieve the loss of his father at ten years old, and the loss of his brother a decade or so later. I listen to six or seven episodes in one weekend, as if I am mainlining drugs. 

In one episode Cooper tells psychotherapist and author Francis Wells that there is sadness that “resides just below the surface of my skin. And I hear it like whispers in every sentence that I speak.” 

My first thought when I heard this is that I didn’t know Anderson Cooper was a poet. And then I thought, yes—yes this is the feeling exactly. The only thing I would add is “and it feels like it is never going away.”

Which, if I’ve picked up anything from all the books and articles and podcasts on grief that I’ve ingested in the last few weeks, it’s the idea that the grief, the sadness won’t, in fact, go away. Maybe it gets easier to hold, but it’s always still there. Cooper asks Wells, “And what do I do about that?” Which I think is another way of saying, how do I get rid of this feeling? How do I get back to how I felt before?

Wells’ response is to point out the insinuation in the question that the feeling is a problem and that it’s wrong. Which is the thing I needed to hear. I needed someone to tell me that it’s okay to feel bad, to hate everything, to cry every day, even though the world wants none of this.

Because my usual tools haven’t been working. Running, reading, writing, walking, coffee with friends, calling friends, breathing, meditation. These are the practices I’ve slowly integrated into my routine since getting sober. Or they are the practices I got more intentional about. I’ve found they keep the demons at bay. That as long as I’m mindful about my inner weather I can keep everything on track. This works when it’s just a light breeze. A brief rain shower. I realize now that most of my time in sobriety has been relatively mild. That most of my storms came before I quit drinking, and so I mostly had to deal with clean up and repair. But being right in the middle of the thunder, the lightning, the sideways pounding rain is a whole other thing, that requires a whole other set of tools. 

There isn’t a way out, is what I’ve learned. There isn’t a fix. No umbrella can withstand this kind of rain. There is no shelter or anywhere to hide. Or, there is—I can always go back to numbing out—but I know that hiding from the pain only leads to more pain. My controlling brain thinks there should be some kind of practice or activity I can do that will help me feel better. That there is something just over there that I can latch onto for some relief. But so far my search has turned up nothing. The answer in all the books and on all the podcasts seems to be that I’m supposed to just stand out in the rain and take it. For as long as the storm takes. 

I do not like this answer.

-Stephanie Vessely

Stephanie Vessely holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University and is currently seeking publication for her essay collection, which was longlisted in the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. Her work appears in December Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, The Offing, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find her at stephanievessely.com or @vesselywriter.